Local women to finish' marathon

Ten days later and some 700 miles west, two local women will finish what they started in Boston last week.

Nancy Smith of Shelby Township and Stephanie Schreiber Bland of Oxford were among the runners whose Boston Marathon was cut short April 15 when terrorists’ bombs marred the event.

The two women will symbolically complete their races Thursday at the Rochester Municipal Park when they participate in an event sponsored by the Your Pace Or Mine Running Club.

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The club will hold a moment of silence followed by a one-mile loop in honor of the 2013 Boston Marathon, the three persons killed in the bombings and the hundreds injured by the explosions.

“We will be wearing our Boston bib numbers and shirts,” said Smith, a third-grade teacher at Roberts Elementary School in Shelby Township. “They will also be putting the medal around our necks at the finish.

“I’m so grateful to them for providing this sense of emotional closure for me.”

Smith, participating in her 13th Boston Marathon, was about one mile from the finish when she and other runners were stopped by a police line and told to leave the course. The runners congregated in a local coffee shop and learned the horrifying reason why they were stopped from television news reports.

Bland’s story was even more harrowing. She was just 0.2 miles and from the finish, which placed her between the locations where the two bombs detonated.

“I started running in the opposite direction of the finish line,” Bland said in a guest articile written for the Detroit Free Press. “ The images I saw will haunt me forever. Everyone was screaming and shouting, ‘Get down, go that way, run this way. ‘ I saw blood covering the streets, I saw people without their limbs. I saw scared people screaming, and I saw my life flash before my eyes.”

Bland and her family, which included her 3½-month- old son, were not injured.

Participants in the Your Pace Or Mine event will be asked wear blue and yellow attire and any clothing that recognizes the city of Boston or the Boston Marathon. The club will end its evening at O’Connors Pub in downtown Rochester.

The run begins at 6 p.m. For more information, visit the event’s Facebook page.